Competitor Manager

Quantifying your work on internet marketing campaigns for your websites or your client’s sites is easy enough, but what if your competitor is performing better than you are? If you could pinpoint the areas where your competitors were out performing you, it could greatly affect your campaign and point you in the correct areas to improve. WIth that in mind, we’ve built several competitor tools into Raven, including the Competitor Manager.

The Competitor Manager (found under the Dashboard, and the Competitors link under SERPS will take you there as well) allows you to manually add up to 10 competitors for each website you’re working with, 20 for those of you using our Agency account. Once you’ve added a competitor in, that comes into play in two very important places within Raven: the SERP tracker, and my personal favorite, the Yahoo! Backlink Importer. The Competitor Manger itself will also tell you very useful data such as PageRank, pages indexed in Google and Yahoo!, and also gives you one click research and SERP tracker adding ability.

After you’ve input URLs into the Competitor Manager, they are available for you to select from a drop down in the SERP tracker so that you can compare your SERPs against an individual competitor. This is extremely helpful if you would like to see how a certain targeted keyword of yours is performing stacked up next to your competition. Are they outperforming you on a high priority keyword? You’ll instantly know that and can know to focus both on and off site efforts on better performance for said word or phrase.

If you’re working on link building, one of the most time intensive parts of the process is doing the initial research, finding quality sites to build links to. Utilizing the Yahoo! Backlink Importer, you can choose any of the competitors that you’ve entered into the Competitor Manager and instantly pull in up to 1,000 of their backlinks at a time. From there, Raven will pull those backlinks into your Link Manager as Competitor Backlinks, and you can decide whether or not those are sites you’d like to pursue in the link building process.

Competitive analysis can be just as important as marketing your own site, and we hope that the Competitor Manager is helpful in that respect. If there are other things you’d like to see within it that would help your workflow, we’d love to hear your ideas.